


Meet the Darkness

by INeedMoreHadesBeforeISwoon



Series: Night's Darkness [1]
Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Lore Olympus (Webcomic)
Genre: Captivity, F/M, Grief, Imprisonment, Insanity, Rise of the Dread Queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:28:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22335562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INeedMoreHadesBeforeISwoon/pseuds/INeedMoreHadesBeforeISwoon
Summary: Persephone, the new Queen of the Underworld, is learning about the various roles she now shares with her husband. This next one, though, has the power to shake up her entire self-image.When the Queen meets the Darkness, who knows what will awaken...?
Relationships: Erebus/Nyx (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hades/Persephone (Lore Olympus)
Series: Night's Darkness [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1607764
Comments: 8
Kudos: 44





	Meet the Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiseryMae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiseryMae/gifts).



> This fic was inspired by a fanart concocted by MiseryMae. The image itself will be included below. I highly recommend you head to the LO Discord to give MiseryMae all the love, because it is quite a wonderful piece!

The portal opened with an iron-bound clang, a tolling of bronze echoing away as the darkness swallowed the oblong shape Hades had outlined with the bident’s points in midair before them.

“Now, remember, you don’t have to be afraid. She can’t hurt you, and you have the authority of the throne behind you. And I mean, she’s a good sort, really. Just…. A little batty…. I mean, she’s not exactly a friend, not after everything, and s-s-she _did_ say once that she thought about kidnapping me or something, but I think she mean-”

“Hades, I’m sure I’ll love her….”

“Well, _love_ might be a stretch, sweetness. She’s a little much, no matter how ya slice it….”

“Titan of the Night, sure, who wouldn’t be a little much…?!”

Hades took Persephone’s left hand in his right, his bident angling ahead of them, a warning and protection, as they entered the portal to the places between realms where the Titans spent eternity….

* * *

The aether-bell clanged, and Nyx turned to the promontory, wondering why he was coming at this time of day.

“Honestly, it’s mid-day, and I was _just_ about to crash! Come on, Little Blue! Let a girl have her beauty sleep!”

But, like a good girl, she turned, planting her knees in the red-running riverbank and assuming a softly-expectant expression.

_If I behave, maybe he’ll open the box…._

The portal finally fizzled into existence a few hundred feet back on the promontory, and Nyx peered with her top three eyes as her lower two focused on the bident. The sharp points glinted with a not-light only beings of Kthonic power could see, and she could swear the dark-glint shone with the blood of Titans, still and ever….

There was a reason they were bound beneath this one’s realm, after all. At least until….

“Well, Little Blue! Who do you have there?!!”

Nyx’s eyes all flew wide open as the tiny pink goddess came farther into her view from behind the King’s torso. Her black Erinye-styled outfit made her seem a strange contrast: soft curves and flowing hair bound beneath leather and metal and….

“Praxidike….”

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

Both the King and the Dread tilted their heads, and Nyx hooted with glee as the pieces fell into place.

“Oh, Little Blue, _finally_ she found you! Excellent! Oh, happy day! This is worth the interruption in my bedtime routine, I tell you what!”

She beamed toothily, her chin on the cliff’s edge, as the two Kthonic gods stood frozen, still only a few feet from where the portal had spit them out on the stone.

Finally, the King seemed to recompose his dignity, and the two of them that held the Titans bound between them came forward once again, this time stopping a few finger-lengths from her face as she peered at them.

Well, her fingers, at least….

“Nyx, this is Persephone, Goddess of Spring, and now, Queen of the Underworld.”

“Praxidike, a Dread honor it is….”

“No, I said Persephone.”

“And I corrected you, Little Blue….”

The pink one giggled, and Nyx felt the tears in all of her eyes as she swallowed thickly.

“Oh, dear…. I haven’t heard a laugh like that in eons, Praxidike…. Rhea, I think…. Yes…. Oh, Little Blue, she’s perfect for you. But more than that, _finally_ she’s here!”

Nyx lunged a little forward, ignoring the bident’s points as they aimed with dripping not-light-blood-memory for her cheek and the eye closest to the King. Her entire focus was on the chin-lifted Queen before her, on the hope she perhaps could fulfill.

“Praxidike, beautiful Dread, one to whom even Tartarus bends in honor…. I beg of thee justice, for myself and my consort. Justice, for we do not deserve this captivity…. Please, release him; let him return to me. I promise, he will no more seek escape. I will keep him close, until you see fit to unbind us from this prison….”

The confusion in those small black eyes had Nyx’s heart pounding in her chest.

“You…. You don’t know who you are, do you?”

The cautious shake of magenta hair had Nyx pulling back and away, settling to her haunches with her hands wrapping around her ribs in hurt.

“Well, then….” She sniffled, and barely heard the sympathetic sigh from the tiny Rhea-looking Queen below. “Um, I…. King Aidoneus, I don’t suppose you could take pity on my consort and I, then…? It’s been so long; please. I miss him so.” She turned her head just enough to glance at the wrinkled brows and narrowed eyes. “Please….”

_Tch…._

Nyx couldn’t suppress a shudder as the sound echoed sharply over the empty spaces of her prison.

_He doesn’t know; he never heard **him** make that sound. It would break his heart to know…. Keep it to yourself, Nyx, there’s a good girl._

“You swear you’ll try to keep a better hold on him?”

“Can anyone truly hold the shadows in their hands? But yes, I’ll try, you know I’ll try….”

_Don’t hope. Don’t hope until he’s here…. And then, rejoice…._

“I know you will…. Alright. Just one moment.”

Nyx closed all her eyes and turned slightly away, fighting the tears and light that burned her heart as the King who bound them all spoke quietly to his Queen: warning her, explaining, but Nyx could spare no thought to listen more closely.

_Please, my Darkness…._

_Behave this time…._

_I miss you so…._

* * *

_Walls…._

_Everywhere, walls…._

_Damn those who bind with walls…._

_Undeserved._

_Unjust._

_Undone…._

_Space…?_

**_Released!_ **

* * *

“Hold on to me, sweetness. This is gonna be a ride for a minute….”

“He’s just another Titan, right…?”

She watched the knob in her husband’s throat bob as he swallowed, and she realized he was afraid of this one, as he was not of Nyx or Styx or Metis or the other Titans he’d already introduced her to in the weeks since they finished their honeymoon.

“He’s a little insane, and that makes him dangerous. Just hold on to me.”

The stone beneath their feet shuddered, the air shivering as if a landslide or avalanche was pummeling toward their position. Her eyes were drawn upward, and she plastered herself to Hades’ side as the not-sky of this Below-Underworld realm was suddenly swallowed up in shifting shadows, flat and somehow roiling all at once.

Nyx turned her face to the boiling darkness so far above, and one claws-tipped hand stretched on a lanky arm, otherworldly in its lines:

Alien, but Persephone would know the expression Nyx wore on her pent-eyed face even if all else was made utterly foreign.

_Love…._

_Pure and deep as mine for Hades…._

The surging shadows slowed, circling around Nyx’s raised fingertips. There was still far too much distance between the underside of the spiraling darkness and her pink-tipped claws, but her knees remained in the blood-bright waters below.

Persephone knew, somehow, that Nyx was making a statement to Hades, that she was no threat, that she and her consort bent to his wishes, bowed to his authority, even though they – perhaps – did not have to….

And she wondered why she felt nothing of gracious kindliness from Hades like he usually showed to these types of deferential displays.

The swirling darkness slowed to a near standstill, beginning to pull downward toward Nyx’s trembling fingertips. The shadows turned into a cascade, a waterfall of darkness, washing over Nyx’s arm and crashing without a sound into the rippling waters below. The water responded, splashing high with the impact, a geyser of bloody-red and utterly-void darkness, obscuring Nyx’s body for a few heartbeats.

Persephone rocked back a little as an immense consciousness suddenly filled this cavernous prison-space between the realms of reality; Hades’ arm tightened a little around her shoulders, and she gasped as the geyser of water and shadow finally settled once more, revealing Nyx and another being, foreheads pressed together in pure feeling.

The presence of Erebus filled Nyx’s cell with need and love so enormous, so massive in its scope, Persephone couldn’t stop the tears that filled her eyes to overflowing. She felt Hades reaching for her mind, trying to show her how to shield herself from the Titans’ emotional influence, but she resisted for a moment longer.

_Could I ever love my husband that deeply…?_

As she finally began to shield her mind, Nyx wrapped her lanky-long arms around the shadow-bound torso of her lover, and whispers of almost-sound shivered through the silence as the Titans embraced.

* * *

**_My beautiful night, I’ve missed you so…._ **

_My darkness, how I love you…. Let me hold you for a moment…._

**_For every moment, please…._ **

_Oh, you…._

Her arms wrapped him around, and he relaxed for the first time in too long as his heart began to beat with her own in perfect rhythm, a song they’d danced to for eons, before all this pain, all this sorrow, all this undeserved…!

_Easy, there, Erebus. There may be some hope yet to be had. Look there, on the cliff…._

**_Forgive me, dearest Nyx mine, but I don’t want to see that little blue traitor today. Why doesn’t he just leave, so I can be with you…?_ **

_Don’t snarl. We have to behave, because he’s finally brought Praxidike to us._

**_For true…?_ **

He turned his head, his cheek and jaw scraping along Nyx’s bony shoulder; he had to blink a few times to get his eyes to work, but finally, he saw her.

**_Oh, my night…. She looks like Rhea…._ **

_I know. But she’s young, very young. She doesn’t exactly understand herself yet._

**_In time…._ **

_And then-_

**_She’ll set us-_ **

**_FREE!_ **

He pulled away from Nyx; she snarled, and he chuckled as her nails clawed across his back as he moved toward the cliff.

Bending at the waist, he brought the Dread of Life closer within his sight, his eyes watering against the brightness of her coloring, against the flaring not-light of her husband’s weapon’s power.

“Praxidike, long we’ve waited for you…. Tell me, what do you like most about your husband these days? His lively humor, or his skill in the bed?”

He smirked as both of them spluttered in outraged embarrassment, and Nyx’s hooting laughter behind him was the sweetest song he’d ever heard. He felt her move up beside him, and he relished the little jolt of fear that rocked the ones that held them bound.

**_Delicious, my dark night…. They’re so much fun to play with._ **

_Don’t push too hard. You need him to forget how naughty you were the last time…._

**_Oh, I won’t push. Much. But I owe him a little pain, for all these nights without you…._ **

* * *

Persephone managed to hitch up the shattered dregs of her dignity before Hades could find his way to stop fuming in silent rage. She stepped carefully to pull her husband into a side-arm embrace and turned a beaming smile on the two massive faces before them.

“Both….”

The Titan of Night and the Titan of Darkness both flung their heads back, bodies bending almost unnaturally far as they cackled and roared with laughter. Persephone took the opportunity as Hades turned fully around, avoiding looking at her and the two incapacitated Titans, to look at the Lord of Shadows a little more thoroughly.

He seemed to be proportioned much the same as Nyx and the other Titans she’d met recently: long arms, long legs, just on the edge of being too long and uncanny. His entire being seemed made of swirling shadows: where Nyx was obviously a solid body, colored like midnight velvet, Erebus seemed a figure of invisible glass, full of coiling shadows bound to a recognizable form. A himation wrapped him in smoking mist, barely obscuring the molded somehow-glass filled with roiling darkness in the traditional manner.

She wondered what would happen if the glass should shatter….

His eyes, two of them, red as fire and sunset, had been intense as he peered at her from above a long nose, so like Hades’ that she wondered if they might not be related. Tendrils of mist and darkness writhed over and behind his head like the Furies’ snake-hair, wispy though, rather than thick. His hands where they clawed at his bent knees and over the middle of his chest, were long-fingered, shapely; these too, she recognized as similar to her husband’s.

Overall, even through the shields around her mind, she could still feel the Titan’s consciousness, teasing along the edges of her awareness, emotions cascading from mirth to pain to love to grief and everywhere in between with every second that passed.

She felt Hades stiffen as he turned back to the tear-wiping Titans, and knew he was putting on his crown – so to speak – to lay out rules before he took them back to their own reality.

He clicked his tongue against his teeth, and the sound acted like a whip on the Titans: Nyx seemed to cower briefly, while Erebus’ eyes flared brighter than a sun going nova as he somehow dissolved and rematerialized in front of Nyx’s trembling form, her claw-tipped hand gripping his shoulder tightly as thunder rolled through the air.

Persephone realized Erebus was growling in a voice so deep it couldn’t be heard, only felt in the soles of her feet and the stuttering of her heart behind her ribs….

* * *

_Erebus, he doesn’t know, please be good, I can’t have you taken from me again…!_

**_Good…? All we have ever done is “be good,” and still he keeps up bound!_ **

_Try for the Dread, not him. You know he won’t change his mind unless she’s involved._

**_…. Fine._ **

Erebus stopped snarling, pulling back on his power’s reach with a bitter taste in his mouth as the bident leveled toward his throat. He turned his gaze to the floral-colored goddess in the uniform of a Fury, the Queen of the Lower Realms, the Dread of Life, Exacter of Justice and Vengeance Made Flesh.

“Praxidike, Dread Queen, forgive me my outburst. I wonder if you might spare a few moments for a Titan to inquire a few things…?”

The little Queen nodded, though her husband glared at him for his skirting of protocol.

“Excellent.”

He blinked, heard his Night-beauty gasp in indignation as he condensed his shadows to a form more fitting the discussion.

He opened his eyes and stood on the stone before Praxidike, of a height with her husband, his body still the bound-shadows he’d always been, but more accessible now for something this important….

“Erebus, you _cheat!_ ”

He turned to his Titanic love, a smirk on his face as the angle from his position to hers so far above placed her cleavage at _just_ the right height for a thorough ogle.

“Ahem. You’re more than welcome to join me, dearest.”

“You know I _hate_ being that cramped….”

“Then please be patient…. I’ll return to you….”

The love in her upper three eyes betrayed the glare her lower two sent him.

He turned back to the ones that held them bound, to eyes wide in a pink face and a blue jaw clenched tight, as he took a steadying breath.

“Forgive me, Dread Queen. I know you are young, unused to Titans. We…. Well, we tend to be rather spastic. Apologies. I would beg a boon of you, whenever it may be within your grace and power to show my love and I this one mercy….”

The King of the Underworld began to move toward his Queen, fully intending to place his body between his wife’s and his uncle’s, but Erebus smiled in savage victory as Praxidike held a hand, palm out and fingers spread, to stop his approach.

She’d deal with the Titan of Darkness on her own terms, and Erebus howled within his mind in hope that perhaps their imprisonment was drawing to an end.

“What mercy can I give that you do not ask of my husband, Erebus?”

**_Oh, you’re good, little pink one…._ **

“The mercy of purer justice than he has dealt us….”

Her face hardened into lines of regal disbelief; however, there was no hint there of a lover’s blind trust in the one who held her heart, and Erebus knew she’d live up to her name.

**_Exact in Justice, indeed._ **

“Explain, Erebus, before I punish your insult to my husband’s honor.”

“Gladly, Beautiful Dread. My love and I, we are bound here, as are the rest of the Titans, but we did _nothing_ to deserve this punishment. Literally, nothing. We did not stand with Kronos. But, neither did we stand with the Six who threw him down. We could not….”

A giant fingertip came alongside his cheek, and he turned his face, brushing a kiss against that cold skin as her heart broke with his once more. He turned back to the floral-pink Queen, and his love’s finger rested oh so lightly on his shoulder.

“We could not bring ourselves to stand between our family and their young. We stood apart, but still, we were punished as if we’d taken up spears and fought on the blood-stained fields.

“We do not deserve these walls. Mercy, Praxidike, is the justice we are due.”

Hades apparently could hold his tongue no longer. Erebus bit back an unworded snarling reply as that iron-hard voice rang out on the cliffside. “As often as you’ve attempted escape, you know I cannot let you loose! You pose too much risk; if I let you out, you could release my fa-….”

Erebus choked back the tears, yanked hard on the chain on his temper, clung for dear life to the little sanity he found in his love’s fingertip weighty on his shoulder.

“I would never. He, of all of them, deserves the walls. But Helios, Selene, Eos…. Them you release daily and nightly, every turn of the earth! Why not us?!!”

Persephone’s raised hand silenced her husband’s biting retort. “It is my understanding that Helios, Selene, and Eos are released to do their duties in the mortal realms. Even still, they are carefully managed, watched over. And they return to their cells when their duties are complete. It is not a perfect solution, but it is the best we have. The mortals need them still, bound as they are to their aspects. But am I not mistaken, that the Night and Shadows are easily managed from within these walls…?”

Erebus felt his heart break as her words tore through his fragile control. Not even his love’s gentle touch, cool on his flushing skin, could hold him back.

“Yes. Our aspects are more ethereal, and we do not _need_ to be loosed to the mortal realm to manage our _duties_ …. But by our very natures, by our aspects themselves, we _need_ the freedom to move, to be, much more than Helios and those others! It’s _not justice_ , Praxidike! Please, I’m begging you!”

His knees bent beneath him, and he bowed before her as he’d never done for any being.

“Please. I can’t take it anymore…! Please…!”

He wept, and then his love was wrapping arms around him, raising him back to his feet, and he opened his misting eyes to see all five of hers before him in a tear-streaked face of midnight-velvet.

“Nyx….”

“For you, I’ll be cramped, my love…. Come here to me….”

She held him to her as his pain and need spiraled out of control, and though he let go the hope of freedom and a life without the walls, he thought, perhaps, it would be enough if only he could hold himself together to stay with her here….

If they were together, perhaps, just maybe, it would be enough for the long, long ages to come….

**Author's Note:**

> THERE'S NEVER ENOUGH EREBUS FOR ME!
> 
> Obviously, this is NOT set in my Primordial Lore universe. I'm sticking closer to the original mythos here, where Nyx and Erebus are together. 
> 
> Additionally, I'm not sorry. I can never just make something happy. There must be pain. 
> 
> Now, you may have noticed I marked this as part of a new series. I'm trying my hand at things being one-shots, within a series, so maybe they're a little easier to tag and rate. For this opener, we're rated mature, cause there's a little sexy feeling going on, but mostly for the discussion of heavy topics of justice/injustice, insanity, and incarceration. 
> 
> The next installment will most likely be some sexytimes after Hades and Persephone FINALLY leave my Titans alone for a bit. 
> 
> But let's just say, I'm really looking forward to exploring a new Erebus, as well as our nutty-batty Nyx. 
> 
> Thanks again to Misery Mae, and I hope you forgive a Swoonie for running far away with your art! 
> 
> For more Titanic goodness, check my Primordial Lore Series! 
> 
> Sending yogurt-love to all of you little ones out there! (check Primordial Lore for why yogurt's a thing.)


End file.
